Sandy relief bill heads to White House

Three months after Hurricane Sandy tore into the Northeast, Congress approved and sent to the White House a long-awaited $50.5 billion aid package to help the region recover from the devastation of the October superstorm.

Passage came on a 62-36 Senate vote Monday evening after New York and New Jersey Democrats opted to embrace the House-passed Sandy bill rather than prolong what had already become a protracted fight over disaster aid.

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Bipartisan calls for Sandy relief bill

“We can’t wait any longer,” Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) told his colleagues in a final appeal. “Ninety-one days ago, Sandy struck a body blow against New York. Today, finally, we can strike back and give our people the help they need to get back on their feet.”

Nine Republicans joined 53 Democrats on the roll call, which narrowly met the required 60-vote threshold. And proponents had to first defeat a last GOP effort to impose across-the-board cuts from prior appropriations to cover the cost.

That proposal, offered by Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), enjoyed support from tea party and anti-tax groups and fit into a recent pattern of conservatives willing to cut defense as well as domestic dollars. The cut itself amounted to just a half-penny from every discretionary dollar over the next nine years but failed 35-62 with 10 Republicans voting in opposition.

Since Sandy hit the Northeast on Oct. 29, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has had adequate resources for the immediate response. But the new money now is pivotal to move to the next phase of recovery and rebuilding.

The long wait has been a lesson in how Washington’s budget politics have changed since Katrina in 2005.

In that case, more than $62 billion was approved within days of the giant gulf storm, and by year’s end — four months after Katrina came ashore — the total aid approached $68 billion. Another round in 2006 added about $20 billion more — all approved by a Republican-controlled Congress without meaningful offsets.

Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), who led the Katrina effort, was a steadfast supporter for the Northeast together with Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby, the new top Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee. But without the near solid support from Democrats in both chambers of Congress, the package would never have succeeded.

The delay is not without costs. New Jersey’s shore economy is just months from its summer season and the vast metropolitan rail system — which serves 40 percent of the transit riders in the nation — remains weakened by Sandy’s flooding.

The South Ferry subway station in Lower Manhattan was largely destroyed, and even more important, perhaps, is the less visible but corrosive impact of salt-water flooding on switches and signal devices. From Coney Island rail yards to tunnels linking Manhattan and Brooklyn, New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority has had to add crews to crank switches by hand or monitor signal lights. And while trains are up and running, it is a more fragile system than it outwardly appears.

“We are struggling to keep that service running,” Adam Lisberg, an MTA spokesman told POLITICO. “As equipment that was doused in salt water fails faster, hard-to-find equipment is depleted and automatic controls give way to manual operations.”